I work here. Inside and outside the prisons

The exhibition Io lavoro qui (“I work here”) comes out of the collaboration with the photographer Giorgio Bombieri, who was asked to capture the faces of today’s cooperative and slices of their everyday work. Valuable insights are offered via the images to help appreciate the contribution that the people, be they free or imprisoned, have given in developing the cooperative and its activities throughout these twenty years of experience, and to reflect on how commitment and work can lay the foundation for a second chance for these prisoners, who do not want to be condemned for life for their mistakes.
The cooperative was created in 1994 from a dialogue between both sides of the prison’s visiting room about offering male and female prisoners the opportunity for training and jobs, because work gives meaning to time spent behind bars and lowers the relapse rate, because prisoners that work experience healthy relationships, they learn, they rebuild a bridge with the world and with their future, because we believe that we do not need prisons that punish and humiliate but prisons that help the inmates not to make the same mistakes.
The cooperative chose to focus on manual labour and on elevated craftsmanship and on the possibility that the fruit of this work would find a place in the free world through sales.  These are genuine “objects with a message” that hold and bear testimony to the story and experience of the person that has worked on them, of their desire to redeem themselves, becoming positive items, a symbol of an encounter and of the resulting unique and dynamic shifts.  Messengers of the positive aspects that the prison experience can give and which may have value for society as a whole.

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